Panther Warning: Avoid Font Book at All Costs
November 12th, 2003In my real life, I play someone who needs to be able to activate fonts on the fly, i.e. someone in a design capacity. I prefer to use an application to activate fonts, regardless of which computing platform I’m using.
For years, I’ve used Suitcase, Font Juggler and the best of the lot, Adobe Type Manager Deluxe (ATM). I still wax nostalgic for the way that ATM Deluxe auto-activated fonts. If I had neglected to activate a font, I didn’t really have to worry, as ATM would catch it. It made font management easy. It took the voodoo out of font management.
Along came Apple’s OS X. Apple, the former king of ease of use, decided to repeatedly kick both itself and it’s users squarely in the crotch (repeatedly) by having not one place for fonts to reside, but about 70 (at last count). This made font management software critical for designers. No longer could we slack on a freelance system and just drag a few fonts or folders to the System Folder. We had to watch our shit.
When Suitcase became available for OS X, everybody started cheering and things looked just swell. It supported (sort of) auto-activation, but because Adobe hates everybody except Microsoft, they forced the use of auto-activation plug-ins for their applications. Plus, the Suitcase interface left room for improvement. Because OS X has about 700 fonts activated at start up, seeing what fonts you have activated was a little weird. I’m sure readers of Slashdot or Ars Technica are ready to shoot me, but I’m going somewhere. Just bear with me, people.
Apple, obviously sensing Adobe’s shift in love (we can only blame Final Cut Pro), decided that with it’s latest system update, 10.3 nee, Panther, that it was time to once again show people how it’s done with a tantalizing font manager called Font Book. It’s Free! It has a metallic interface!
The problem is that it’s clearly meant for no one to actually use.
I added a few hundred fonts to it. It was very fast. I started to move towards my Suitcase CD to fling it into the air like I just graduated from college. Then, my machine, a dual G5 (work is nice) slowed to a crawl. I stopped my move towards the Suitcase CD. Upon further notice, I now had something like 1,900 fonts open and trying to close them all took about 45 minutes. Font Book started to respond, but then would randomly jump. Font names wouldn’t correspond with the preview. I screamed and fled.
I tried to reset everything back to normal, but when I installed Suitcase, I found that Font Book had done something with my fonts. They were gone from their original folders. Fortunately, I had a back up of my fonts and was able to overwrite the shell of a font folder.
I’m forced to ask what millions of Windows users have asked everyday, what in the name of God is Apple smoking releasing such a pile of useless crap?
Word.
hmm, and i thought it was only my geeky illustrator boyfriend who nearly took up terrorism when he switched to osx and started using fontreserve last june. after much pounding of furniture and creative strings of obscenities, he actually wrote a long and hilarious letter to diamondsoft which i will duly append:
>Dear tech support person:
>
> Just recently purchased Font Reserve 3.1.1
>after many happy years of using ATM, which sadly >>>isnàt supported in OSX. I emailed earlier today >regarding my mounting frustration at not being able to
> get Font Reserve to do anything other than create handsome organizations of
> fonts within its own browser that have absolutely nothing to do with how my
> fonts are organized (ie. activated and deactivated) within other apps. In
> other words, it does nothing but look good.
>The Font Reserve Browser indicates the correct list of activated fonts as
> specified by me, but when I use any app (eg. illustrator 10.0.3, flashmx,
> wordx, fireworksmx, etc.) all 2000 of my fonts come up as active in the
> respective app. character window, which is what I’d hoped Font Reserve was
> going to eliminate. This was the sole reason for its purchase.
>
> Since the directions in the anemic quick start guide accompanying the
> software, and the anorexic “support” available on your web site offer
> next-to-nothing by way of relevant assistance, I made the mistake of
> continuing to address this problem myself (since it’s also the weekend and
> tech support throughout the galaxy is closed).
>
> Am now left with a Mac (os 10.2.6) that is missing fonts as part of its basic
> desktop display, which means that my desktop folders are all nameless and
> indistinguishable, my email program has blank stretches of screen where there
> used to be informative text, and the Font Reserve Browser is quitting after
> the following error window pops up upon launching, and I click ok (a copy of
> the error window is attached herewith).
>
> So far, Font Reserve has left me sadder than Bush’s stealing of the last
> election, multiplied by the recent wealth redistribution package, anna nicole
> smith, jeans with faux fading on the ass and thighs and without pockets,
> starbucks, and the insidiousness of planned obsolescence with the computer
> industry.
>
> I need help getting my computer running right away, with all the proper fonts
> where they should be, and your product doing what it’s supposed to do.
>
> Thank you for your assistance. You have my sympathies for being unfairly
> compensated for the stressful time you put in at the grindstone, whilst your
> senior executives wipe their asses with 24K gold leaf.
>
> Glad tidings.
>
> - Roy G. Biv
Learn to love Suitcase. It is the best of a bad lot. Font Book is clearly only for the casual user not the power user. Its probably fine for those that need to activate A font, not the entire Adobe collection.
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t really make that clear do they?
i’m sorry, i’ve been out of town for a couple of weeks. am i to understand that bill gates took over apple?
boy am i glad i’m not a power user. i just use my Ti to surf for porn and leave witty comments on weblogs.
Oh, don’t get me started on Font Book. I had the exact experience as you, unfortunately the only backup I had of my fonts included about 8 million handwriting-esque fonts that nobody can explain why we bought them. So now I have to go clean all of those out. Now I only have 80 fonts or so in Font Book lest I crash again, and the auto activation, or even the abiity to activate a font while in a program does not work.
Well two steps forward, two steps back.
Suitcase. There are no options.
Fonts in 70+ locations? Ahh, the love of a unixy/linuxy system. Reading this entry made me feel oh so much like it was 1993 not 2003. So Apple made font rendering just sublime in OSX but they forgot the management stuff. Good God. Hate to say it but this is classic Apple leaving behind what it once thought to be important: publishing. I mean really, Suitcase came about in the days of System 6 for not just fonts but DAs. I can believe one still has to use it for something so “core” to the OS. What’ll they think of next? three letter extensions to indicate the content of a file?!
same experience. You have given me hope that it is resolvable. I will never open fontbook again. EVER. I don’t care if I’m on a G8 in 2015, it will never happen. The horror. But hey, better than worm viruses.
The thing that really bugs me… nothing from apple. Not a damn peep. With everybody screaming and freaking out. Not a single fricking word on how to resolve this…
FIX IT APPLE.
NOW.
No more iPod updates. No more iTunes. Screw Safari. And take your damn iSync and shove it. I NEED FONTS. WORDS. LETTERS. SERIF AND SANS. The next unit past 1’s and 0’s. If you can’t do that, don’t do anything. At least my friends with PC’s have letters on their screens.
Font book… Font vortex more like. d@#$heads…
Font Book fu*ked me too. Suitcase is incompatiable with Panther at least for another few weeks, Font Book is unusable for more than 50 fonts. I am a designer with deadlines and now I can’t work. Thanks Apple, I love using Verdana on all my projects.
Rich,
Suitcase X11 might be problematic, but I’m running Suitcase 10.1.3 just fine on Panther.
I found the solution. My Rapidograph. If you don’t know what it is then you’re too young to appreciate what Apple did for our industry. I’m about to toss my OSX and get back to 9 where I can run a non-corel-like version of Illustrator and actually use fonts with ATM. I now have Font Reserve, Suitcase and lots of AOL disks to line my trash can.
It seems that no one has mentioned has confused Font Book gets (by confesed I mean CRASHES) whenever you try to load a PostScript font. But It does love TrueType, and now I can use all the crappy unkearned fonts out there. I’m put suitcase X1 back….now I just have to find my fonts.
Christ! I’ve upgraded to Panther, and I don’t *think* I’m using Font Book, but I suspect that somewhere, secretly, it is oozing into the shard remnants of Suitcase that remain. And last year, I thought Apple couldn’t make the font issue ANY worse. And these Open Face fonts: are we supposed to repurchase all of our fonts to get them to get along with Indesign? Ahh, helvetica.
If only I had found this blog entry sixteen hours ago! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!
* smooths hair, adjusts glasses *
The much anticipated Font Book…. I too wish I had found this site some 10 hours ago before I attempted to install ALL the Adobe Font Folio fonts into the system! I noticed the problem when I tried to go on the web and the text was nothing but numbers and fractions, same sort of thing in email. I hate you apple….at least for bit.
I wish I had found this earlier, too. ATM was my ideal font manager. Why don’t we have it for OS X? Who do I have to “service” at Adobe to make this happen?!
Harrumph.
THANK GOD FOR YOU GUYS! I was just given the task of installing Panther on all our design macs over the Christmas break. I was just trying to figure out this Font book thing and how to install our font collection - an average one for our biz of about a thousand fonts. We are getting Suitcase sent down to us (we are in Bermuda) so I guess I should wait for that huh?
DO NOT TOUCH FONT BOOK. Wait for Suitcase. Also, pour yourself a drink or two whilte waiting for Suitcase.
FONT BOOK FURY *%£@)(
Have just installed Panther - was trying to make the final passover to OSX - now one and a half days later I am back working in OS9.2.2 - hale-flipping-lujah!!
I like others had only wished I had found this site earlier - it seems there will constantly be a problem with the most up-to-date releases from Apple that will never work until all other vendors catch up - so a word from the wounded - if it ain’t broke . . don’t upgrade until the fix is available
:( 
ok, get this…i’m reading the help file in X1, and it says that fonts may not preview unless activated in font book. that means i have to add all of my fonts to font book, activate all 1,500 of them, THEN open suitcase and activate, then deactivate them all, and THEN I should be able to see my font faces in the preview pane?
I don’t get it. the whole setup was working fine when I first installed X1 on Panther…then, some damaged font caused a crash, and ultimately forced me to reinstall suitcase. since then, my preview pane says “review not available” for every font. i dod what the help section said for a few fonts…you know to test it out…and it worked. but for about 50 fonts, it took about a half hour. so, to see the other 1450 or so fonts in suitcase, i need, what, about another fifteen hours to deal with this issue before i can do any real work.
lovely.
not to mention, font book puts all of it’s known fonts into your library/fonts/ file so the entire system is slowed to a crawl on this 533 G4.
way to go, stevie boy…why don’t you go make another cartoon for the kids?!?!
alright…got it. i took all the fonts out of that library/fonts folder [note:that's the user/library, not the system/library!] and trashed my fontbook prefs and suitcase prefs, reloaded all fonts into X1, and now i’m back where I was before i encountered that corrupted font.
i’ve been using OSX for about two months now, and all i can say is “it sure is pretty!”
I knew i should have waited for X.5…maybe they’ll have it finished by then?
Thank god - I thought I was an experienced mac user, a techie of sorts, and now I had completely lost it with Font Book in Panther. You have know idea how relieved I was to find and read your article and all the info below. No doubt there will be an update shortly and not have to wait until the release of Mac OSX1 Godzilla!?
Ditto on all of the above with an added Font Book quirk. If you disable “certain” fonts (nobody can tell me which ones) you’ll disable Safari, the Preferences folder, help and who knows what else?
As far as I’m concerned, the people at Apple have whipped up a batch of Jim Jones Kool Aid, named it Panther, and will be watching dumbfounded as we, the Mac faithful, fall to the groundónever to buy another upgrade, or CPU from them again.
What an absolute shame.
Oh dear…
I¥ve been using all of these mentioned programs under classic Mac OS and Mac OS X (now 10.3). The biggest disaster ever wasn¥t caused by Fontreserve, Suitcase or Fontbook, it was caused by Font Doctor. Before I had about 300.000 fonts ready to use, after touching them with Font Doctor only 15.000 were left. Just some days ago versiontracker showed the update of Font Doctor, mentioning some kind of troubles in former versions…
It seems to me that fonts are still some kind of unloved child to Apple.
Well, I’m not a professional designer so I can’t speak to that but I haven’t had ANY problems with FontBook, except that, unlike the old free-standing version, it won’t print preview sheets, and it also won’t show me font families with flippy triangles for the styles. I’ve disabled and enabled fonts on the fly without a hiccup. It also isn’t that tough to know where the different font libraries are in X and to put in each one the fonts you want. Suitcase X was a horror story. FontBook is imperfect but causes no problems (and I’ve got a piddly little G4 eMac and FontBook hasn’t slowed me at all).
After 2 years of hell with OS X trying to get fonts to work then 6 burned out hard drives after installing Panther on my Dual G4, that was then sent to the shop for 2 weeks and came back with a new motherboard, power supply, hard drive and Super Drive, I have discovered that my $1200 refurb Dell 360 2.8 Ghz workstation could do everything my Mac did and did not crash when I opened helvetica in Quark. I can also still use my Imacon Scanner with a scsi interface.
So Apple , it’s been a nice long ride and I love ya but I gotta get some work done and fucking around all day with helvetica just ain’t gonna do it.
So bye bye for now. I’ll deal with the viruses and worms. Give me a ring if you ever get your shit together.
whoooa! I installed Panther and since then, I am back to a WINDOWS state of mind … apps are blcoked, fonts render falsely, hmmm, Panther is shiot! true shiot! why would we pay for such garbage … steve jobs is a looser …. don’t bring features that bring down your system …. idiot!
FUCK… etc etc… all that is left of my neatly organised fonts, are the neatly organised folders, with no fonts in them, just to remind me how nice it used to be.
Not only that, but no version of suitcase will run on my machine now. I’m about to do a clean install, just so i can get X1 working, (as i have found it does on a virgin system)
it’s sad that apple are heading down the wrong track, designers are starting to be treated as people who couldnt get into a commerce degree.
FUCK… etc etc… all that is left of my neatly organised fonts, are the neatly organised folders, with no fonts in them, just to remind me how nice it used to be.
Not only that, but no version of suitcase will run on my machine now. I’m about to do a clean install, just so i can get X1 working, (as i have found it does on a virgin system)
it’s sad that apple are heading down the wrong track, designers are starting to be treated as people who couldnt get into a commerce degree.
Steve Jobs brags about how many people are using OS X… I think the last I heard it was only around 40%. I honestly think if shithead finally focused on Fonts in OS X that percentage would easily be 60% plus by now. FUCK! FIX the fucking FONT problem, Apple!
Maybe Apple is planning on getting out the computer market and is planning to become only a provider of mp3 players and downloadable songs? Fuck font managment for OS X, right? Let’s work on other shit!
FUCK!
I had the same problem while installing Font Folio 10. After calling Apple and being told to reinstall, I decided to fix it myself. What I did was delete every font in /Library/Fonts that had the same name as a font in /System/Library/Fonts and then restart. Everything is working fine now. Feel free to email me with any questions.
It really is a shame that font management, a critical part of overall system and application performance, is so unsolved.
It seems like Apple is more interested in pursuing “latest and greatest” instead fixing basic problems that make people’s lives really shitty every single day.
I have struggled with Fontbook, then with Suitcase 11.0.2, and now again with Fontbook. After over 100 hours spent trying to get fonts to act reasonably I’ve come to the conclusion that the best solution is to bug the shit out of Apple……..squeeky wheel theory. I hope for the sake of everybody’s benefit, that everybody that is reading all this bullshit calls Apple at least once a week to put yet another Apple techie through the paces of trying to solve a problem that really requires some reengineering. Eventually Apple will get the message that font management is more important than iSight.
Call 1-800-275-2273 now! Please!
It is SO nice to know that I’m not the only one who wants to set Font Book on fire. What a piece of shit.
I’ve been having the exact same problems on Panther! It took me a ridiculous amount of time to deactivate all my fonts and I tried to activate only the ones I couldn’t live without, I could only stand waiting for one suitcase to ‘instantly activate’… and that brought me here.
I am shocked that Apple has produced such a garbage font management system…. what about us designers?!
I just upgraded from jaguar to panther. The fonts I already had inside my user font folder have remained in their respective folders and have been added into font book. However when I now add new fonts they do, as above people have pointed out, just get all thrown into one file.
I’m so glad I found this site! I I thought it was just me because my husband always says I play too much on my mac and screw it up. I just wanted to install 1 font group (Poetica) from my old system and when that worked I was sooo happy that I got daring and tried to bring in all my old Font Folio. BIG MISTAKE!!!!
2 days later and only 20 or so fonts available but at least I’m up an running again. Still love Apple and Panther but I’m not a designer (other than some marketing for myself and some other small local groups). I’d just like a nice old LettraSet book or hard copy of my old fonts so on the rare occasion I need one I could find it without having to go through them one by one!
I have found a simple way to manage fonts using osx without font book. You simply go to your library folder, Fonts, and make an alias of the fonts folder, put that alias on your desktop and whenever you need a specific font for a job you simply copy it into that folder and it will be active. This leaves your system fonts alone and it easily actives only what you need. The only drawback is that it requires dilgence on your part in removing unnecessary fonts from that folder. If any of these fonts conflict with safari or text edit, simply remove them and those apps will work just fine.
I recommend that everyone that reads this sends feedback to apple every day. I make it a ritual to tell them how much font book sucks. maybe there will get the picture someday.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/
Wow, trying to run illustrator 10 with 10.3 and over 1500 fonts to choose from with my trusty dusty 867 G4 made me want to rip out all my hair. Computer slows to a crawl and I can barely even look at anything in safari due to the fact that after I ran font book, now suitcase takes up over 70% of my memory. Hell, opening font book for the first time I quit out of it because I thought the ap locked up. Nope, it was just turning on every damn font I have on this computer.
What happens if I just use the fun drag and drop to trash with font book, empty and never look back? Any system problems with that? Does osx.3 need that application? And what good is suitcase when it can’t display of find half the fonts anyway?
Thank you guys for confirming what I was slowly realizing with horror. This is an utter disaster. I just sent some screaming feedback to apple. I have tried fontbook, font catalog, font agent pro and suitcase (latest version). I hate them all.
Use NOT the Font Book! I too was lured by the enticing concept of an Apple specific font management software, but NO! The devil rose his wicked head and f**king ATE my fonts when I deleted them from Font Book. The air turned blue around me. Co-workers shied away in horror. My hobbies now include high explosives and floor plans of the Apple Headquarters. If I ever find the idiot who created OS X, I will rip off his arm and BEAT him to death with it!
I will say it in one word: fontreservefontreserveWhatTheHellWereYouThinkingApplefontreserve
The war on terrorism must begin with Apple’s OSX font problem. Then, and only then, can we look toward a peaceful future.
Bugger . . . .
Apple won’t help me!!! I upgraded from OS8.1 to OSX Panther 10.3.3, and ALL of my Type 1 font show up as Unix Executable files when transferred to the OSX and obviously won’t load as fonts. Apple says that’s my fonts problem. They can’t help. Every file we’ve done for the last 15 years uses that set of fonts. I need them. I can’t buy ALL new fonts! If anyone has had a simmillar problem please email me.
Font Book was the reason i bought Panther….I was excited for this app, since fonts have always been my arch-enemy.
Does not work as advertised. At all. Disabling doesn’t disable. WTF?
Glad I am not alone. Lets all take a road trip to CA and knock on the door until they do something.
Font book is the worst program ever create, had about 200 fonts loaded, worked fine for a while, then tried to open it and up pops a blank font book with spinning dotted circle, just as bad as spinning beach ball of death.
Tried deleting original collection from the library and nothing works.
Apple please go back to being adobe’s little whore and take one for the team. We need Atm back!!
I’d rather suck mud out of my own ass then deal with Font Book. Apple, get your, um, shit together.
THANK YOU ALL for confirming my worst fears… I am trying to manage two computer clusters, used by about 200 students on an almost 24/7 basis (design + illustration) and font management has always been a problem. Now, it’s impossible.
I’m about 40 hours into cleaning things up. Maybe…
Oh, thank God, I thought I was losing my mind.
I have spent the last three days trying to get the IT professionals at my company to understand the value of font management. Seeing as how I am a lone Mac on an NT network, I am often looked at with a great deal of distrust anyway. They insist that I do not need Suitcase because Panther ships with a perfectly good font management utility. (I knew better; any program that automatically dumps everything into a System folder is BAD NEWS). I will definately be forwarding this link.
Bought a new G5 in January with OSX.3, but have been too busy to make the switch from my G4 9.2 system. Thank God I found this site, my plans for today were to dissect all my font folders and try to figure out this mess.
Would have been a disaster! You would think that when developing new systems, they would be tested by people using software in a real life work environments.
I do have Suitcase 10.2.2, but fonts not activated in it are still open. Yesterday I moved all the Asian fonts into a folder on my desktop, but they still come up active when I open Illus 10. I tried to locate where all these fonts reside… but I am now totally confused. HELP!
Have also had problems when downloading digital images, The system makes all kinds of extra folders and thumbnail files. I just want is to know where my files are and not have all this extra crap thrown in randomly.
My email also keeps cutting out on my new machine.
Glad I spent big money on this new apple system… I was afraid of being left behind, now I don’t want to even go there.
bogs - at least you can all get fonts into this program from hell even if you now wish you hadn’t!!! I just want ONE font (Barmeno) to show up right now… I have tried everything but the little bugger just burrows deeper and deeper into my system and has lost all those essential postscript things as well!! Wish I’d stuck with OS 9.2 now - at least I could PDF all my artwork properly and open something serious without little mad icons bouncing about all over the place. Can’t believe I have just spent £100 to f**k up my mac like this - but perhaps I’ll get a massive virus now that will sort it all out!!!